Infrastructure Refresh

Introduction

A mid-sized international law firm headquartered in London had a requirement to refresh the IT infrastructure in five of their international offices based in Oman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain and Cairo. The project scope, timelines and budgets had already been agreed within the business and Fully Meshed IT was engaged to design and implement a standardised template for each of the offices based on Avaya and Aerohive networking equipment, IBM compute and storage and VMware and Microsoft software technologies.

FMIT approach

During this project our engineers developed a standard template for automating infrastructure installation with a series of bespoke build scripts which allowed the client to have local IT resources physically install the equipment and then initiate the build out of the infrastructure by simply powering the equipment on. Once the initial build scripts had completed the infrastructure was accessible from London headquarters where the systems were then passed on to applications teams for final configuration tasks. We produced infrastructure documentation detailing high and low level designs and authored the operations manuals for every office and we provided training for junior engineers to carry out the physical installation and build process. We engaged with Application Support teams to provide detailed infrastructure design documents to facilitate the configuration of their applications.

Results

We succeeded in completing the project to very tight timescales. Our client was able to significantly cut international travel costs as a direct result of our bespoke automated build out process. The transition from project to operational support was achieved with minimal fuss due to our detailed documentation and we were retained by the client to assist on another infrastructure project.